Report Formatters are actually running as Application Server Tasks. This means that when you select the Report Formatters item in the navigator you will end up in the Application Sever Tasks form. Read more about the Report Formatter concept.
Configuration of Report Formatters include printers, threading, polling intervals and more.
Note: In a fresh install the Report Formatter task will be stopped, just as all other tasks. Make sure the batch server is running and start the Report Formatter task.
Report Formatters are typically named something like Processing Print Jobs, and set up to use a separate queue. They could be called anything though. What makes a specific application server task a Report Formatter is that it's a task of the job type PrintAgent (the naming is a legacy from older IFS Applications versions, a Print Agent is something else and should not be confused with a Report Formatter). If you navigate into the detail view of a Report Formatter application server task,
Standard properties of the application server task are listed to the left and the right top corner (recurrence patterns). The Report Formatter specific configuration is found on the right hand side and includes printers, default locale, and language.
Recurrence Pattern is the way to configure how often the Report Formatter should check the print job queue for any new jobs to process. Once triggered all pending jobs that match the Report Formatter selection criteria will be processed, so this parameter essentially controls the average delay before a job is being picked up in an idle situation. It's recommended to poll the print queue quite often, the default is every second.
The Report Formatter Job Parameters section is where printers are managed and default locale and language options are set.
The Logical Printers listed in the configuration determines what print jobs the report formatter will process. In a production environment there's no need to map logical printers to physical printers in the Report Formatter configuration, this is done in the Print Agent configuration. The ability to map to physical printers in the report formatter configuration is purely a demo/test/development feature where it's possible to run without a Print Agent - this is not supported in production however. When adding logical printers bare in mind that two Report Formatters should normally not be set up to serve the same logical printer, but several logical printers might very well be mapped to the same physical printer. Physical network printers are referred to using the UNC path, \\<server name>\<printer name>.
When language and locale isn't specified in the print job, the default values specified for the Report Formatter are used. This affects things like date and number format. In many, but not all cases, this information if part of the request and the default values are not used.
External Report Formatter URL should be left empty, unless setting up an External Report Formatter (i.e a Report Formatter running in a separate/secondary application server). If separate application servers have been set up, the URL specified should reflect the connection URL to the secondary system, <host>:<port> (i.e. http://corpnet.ifsworld.com.lkpgseapp7:58080). Refer to the installation guide for instructions on how to setup an external report formatter.
The way to manage multi threading and parallel processing of print jobs is through message queue management, part of the IFS Connect configuration.
It is possible to setup any number of Report Formatters. They can run in separate application servers, or coexist in the same application server. They can run on separate hardware or coexist on the same. Regardless on which the key to controlling the parallel processing and multi threading is to have them run a in separate message queues, since that gives the best control. A message queue has a max processes parameter that determines how many jobs it can process in parallel. In order to have a Report Formatter process jobs in a single thread (i.e. in sequence) this parameter should be set to 1. In most cases you would like parallel processing though and the way to achieve this is to bump up the max processes parameter (8 might be a good number for a decent quad core setup). Formatting reports is a quite CPU and memory intensive process, so it's important to balance the parallelism against the potential load it can put on the server.
Multiple tasks (Report Formatters or other tasks) sharing the same queue will also share the available processes/threads. This is why a setup with a dedicated queue for each formatter gives the highest flexibility and the best control. The Report Formatter task setup by default will run in a dedicated queue called BATCH2. It's easy to create more queues if setting more Report Formatters. Refer to Create/Edit and Delete Message Queues for more details on how to do this.